Slashdot Mirror
A Case for Non-Net-Neutrality
boyko.at.netqos writes "Network Performance Daily has an in-depth interview with Professor Christopher Yoo from Vanderbilt University Law School on his opposition to Net-Neutrality policies. While some might disagree with his opinions, he lays out the case for non-neutrality in an informed and informative manner. From the interview: 'Akamai is able to provide service with lower latency and higher quality service, because they distribute the content. This provides greater protection against DoS attacks. It's a local storage solution instead of creating additional bandwidth, and it's a really interesting solution. Here's the rub ... Akamai is a commercial service and is only available to people who are willing to pay for it. If CNN.com pays for it, and MSNBC.com does not, CNN.com will get better service.'"
Huh? How is the last-mile market competitive? Where I live, I have 1 option for high-speed internet: the cable company. The phone company refuses to build a switching station to offer DSL. As far as I'm concerned, I'm living in a monopoly market, the very opposite of the one described in the article.
I wouldn't have a problem with network non-neutrality if the ISP market was a competitive one, allowing me to switch to a better ISP if my current provider was not meeting my needs. Given that I don't live in that kind of a market, I support network neutrality as it provides a compromise solution that meets the needs of most people while causing as little harm as possible.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Bullshit.
You and Prof. Christopher Yoo make the same fundamental mistake. Net Neutrality is *not* about preventing people from optimizing the Internet!
It *is* completely about preventing abuse of monopolistic power by telco companies. (This is espcially urgent in light of the reconstitution of the old AT&T). It is to prevent telcos from offering "protection" for your valuable content.
AT&T: That's an awful nice video service you've got there Mr. YouTube. It sure would be a shame if somthing were to happen to all those pretty little bits flowing over our network...
YouTube: What could happen to them?
AT&T: -laughter- Hey guys...he wants to know what could *happen*! -more laughter-
People always say that this can't happen because of competition. Again, bullshit. What ISP you use doesn't matter in the slightest; at some point, your bits *will* cross AT&T's network. If you don't pay the "protection", your poor little bits might have one hell of a time making it to their destination.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
His problem is that he makes good points but then loses his credibility by following them up directly with bad points. I suspect that most geeks would agree that TCP is a great protocol that has stood the test of time. Sure it could probably be improved, but for the most part it's rock solid.
Unfortunately, because of what he said about TCP, it's easy to miss the other point he was trying to make. If we mandate protocols, QoS, etc., we are likely stiffling future innovations in this area. It's not at the same layer of the OSI model, but imagine if HTTP and FTP had been mandated at the application layer. Would we have ever had Bittorrent?
Exactly. Net non-neutrality amounts to handing over a bunch of public infrastructure to the Telco cartel to have them turn around and extort us.
Never mind the models whereby you could actually pay to slow a competitor's traffic. It's all the worst of Google Ad Words wrapped into what has become an essential service.
There is also an aspect of net-neutrality that protects you. If the mega-corp-dominated infotainment industry isn't keeping you informed on what you really need to know, you might turn online for the information. Net neutrality could kill the blogosphere and would at the very least further stratify the digital divide.
I pay for my web server to have X-amount of bandwidth a month.
I pay my ISP at home for access to the the internet.
So now I will have to pay my ISP even more so they don't slow down my access to my webserver from my home.
Using Akamai is just paying for bandwidth for your server. It is nothing but hosting. It really has nothing to do with net neutrality.
That is the core of this problem. The users are paying for network access. The people producing the content are paying for network access. The ISPs want the content providers to pay them even if they are not the ISPs customers!
Kind of a data black mail or protection racket. I can see them now, "Yous know it would be a real shame if some of your packets where to get lost, if you know what I mean. You really wouldn't want that now would you?"
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Net Neutrality means that carriers cannot discriminate based upon the type of traffic you're sending. HTTP traffic and SSH traffic would be treated equally. Whether that's a good thing is for you to decide.
As twbecker mentions in his reply to your post, I think you don't exactly have it straight, either, so I just want to clarify a little more on what he said. It's not about the type of traffic (although that's the type of argument they give), it's about discriminating based on who provides the content. If there was a way to prioritize VoIP in general, without giving preferential treatment to Comcast over Vonage, that wouldn't be as bad (although I'm not sure I trust anyone out there -- ISPs, the government, or content providers -- to decide what types of traffic are more important than others), but the real potential problem is that Comcast can screw with the Vonage traffic so that the service basically doesn't work anymore... All of a sudden, it looks like Comcast's VoIP is the only service that "works" in your area, so that's what you're stuck with (no matter how good or bad the service might be).
The problem is that the ISP's want to provide content now, and they are wanting to extort money out of all of the companies who have actually worked for years to build their content services, just to stay on equal footing with the ISP's. It's funny how one of the arguments of the ISP's against neutrality is "There's no evidence that we would mess with your traffic, so you shouldn't make it illegal to mess with it", but at the same time, they're speaking out against Google and others, saying that those content providers are getting a "free ride" on their Inter-tubes (never mind the fact that the content providers are already paying their own Internet service bills, and their customers are paying their own bills, so nobody is actually getting a free ride). Websites like Hands off the Internet are really frustrating, because it's such a twisted, astroturfing, messed up view, accusing the people who want a level playing field of trying to get money from the average joe. When actually, it's been the telecoms screwing over average joe with all of the extra charges we were paying for years that were supposed to have brought us all great broadband service years ago.
I'm against part of what I see in 'net neutrality', but against other parts.
It seems to me there are two mixed up issues in net neutrality: One is common carrier rules, and the other is tiered internet, and in reality they don't have too much to do with each other. Supposedly a tiered internet implies lack of common carrier rules, but I disagree.
I'm in favor of common carrier rules so that ISPs cannot hold their customers ransom to content providers. i.e., they shouldn't be able to block or filter packets based on who is sending them. (in other words, the packets are anonymous - you can't look at who they're from)
But what does that have to do with a tiered internet? As I understand, a tiered net is a bit more like having 4 (or whatever) nets. What stops each of these nets from being just as anonymous as the one we have now? I've heard one idea that it somehow allows ISPs greater ability to filter packets, but can't they already do that with traffic analysis anyway? (and I hear some have even tried to do so, and rightfully got sued) The article suggests another idea, that if we want common carrier rules, we have to have strict inflexible protocols stuck forever as they are now for it to work, and this would halt progress and block us from ever using a tiered net. I haven't read the guy's work, but don't we just need a rule that 'you can't discriminate against anyone'? No need to force everyone to use some particular protocol.
And by the way, a tiered internet could be a good thing for everyone, if the economics works out: It could help stop ISPs overselling their service, since they could more easily partition out their service to customers, rather than the one-size-fits-all we have now. Content providers who don't need the extra advantages of the 'higher' tiers also wouldn't have to pay for them, while those who do need them can get them.
Think about it. . .BGP routes based on the least number of hops.
No they are not. BGP routes are based on the least number of traversed autonomic systems (ie. networks) - it's a path vector protocol. And you can still attach a metric value to specific peers when distributing the routes to your whatever you are running internally (IS-IS, OSPF, etc).
Of course you cannot tell anything from the internal state of your peering network (unless the peer is smart enough to stop advertising if, say, half of it's core network goes down even though connectivity is still possible). But hey, I'm nitpicking here...
I gather he's seriously a professor, but apparently not in a field that has much to do with computers. In particular, this quote from TFA:
...leapt out at me. First, the people who know the most about network protocol usage are firewall admins, network admins/managers, ISPs, and so forth-- who tend to identify themselves specifically as such, not as "technologists". Secondly, the overwhelming majority of network traffic (especially Internet traffic) is based off the TCP/IP protocol suite.
"If you talk to most technologists, they believe TCP/IP is now obsolete."
Now, there are parts of TCP/IP which are not commonly used or are not especially relevant, so yes, a few parts are obsolete, but overall, TCP/IP is becoming more commonly used rather than fading away...
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-synta
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://www.networkperformancedaily.com
trackback:ping="http://www.netqos.com/MT/mt-tb.cg
dc:title="Network Neutrality Debate: A Case for Non-Neutrality"
dc:identifier="http://www.networkperformancedaily
dc:subject="Commentary"
dc:description="Prof. Christopher Yoo, Vanderbilt University School of Law This article continues our series examining the issue of Network Neutrality. Professor Christopher Yoo joined the faulty of the Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1999, and his research focuses primarily on..."
dc:creator="brianboyko"
dc:date="2007-01-05T14:10:48-06:00"
</rdf:RDF>
===================
This article continues our series examining the issue of Network Neutrality.
Professor Christopher Yoo joined the faulty of the Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1999, and his research focuses primarily on how technological innovation and economic theories of imperfect competition are transforming the regulation of electronic communications.
In addition to clerking for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and working at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson under the supervision of now-Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., he has also published "Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion" [PDF] in Georgetown Law, and "Beyond Network Neutrality" [PDF] in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.
We asked him to share his thoughts on Net Neutrality with us.
The boundaries are a little fuzzy in spots.
I have seen people argue that, since I have a tiny little ISP, I ought to be treated like a common carrier.
If I am, this creates a problem for me, which is that I don't want to offer the same quality of service to cyberpromo that I do to legitimate email. (Yeah, I know cyberpromo's long-dead. You know what I mean.)
Now, obviously, most of us assume that networks are allowed to drop spam, or whatever... But pretty often, when people write up a definition of net neutrality, it ends up having the logical implication that I can't null-route spammers.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Actually Hops (or rather transit AS's) is the 3 or 4th (4th in a Cisco world) step in the actual decision tree.s _tech_note09186a0080094431.shtml
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologie
and you should consider what happens when your a Tier-1 provider. You may have 3,4,5 or 100 different paths to a specific subnet, all at the same as_path length at which point it doesn't matter.
BGP is an Exterior Routing protocol. Your "Sure Route IP" is extremely dependent upon BGP since its more of a load balancing protocol and doesn't have a clue about the underlying architecture. Relying on ping data is as stupid as you can get. Most ISP's worth there salt put ICMP (or the UDP equivalent) in the lowest class of service they have.
BGP also does a TON more of stuff than you give it credit for and quite frankly is way more important than your load balancing software. I would say it does MORE than "Sure Route IP" but thats like comparing apples to sidewalks.
The problem with this whole situation is that the FCC ruled that the current crop of cable telecoms are NOT common carriers and are not bound by the law governing common carriers. That decision is why Net Neutrality is even an issue.
And what I want to know is: what the hell did the telecoms do with that $200 billion in handouts they got to run fiber to curb by 2006? One of the reasons they claim they need to be able to double and triple dip for cash on the same content is that they can't pay for F2C. The government gave them a crapload of handouts (OUR tax money) and they squandered...and now they want to charge US for stepped service to replace the money they squandered...and we'll probably STILL not get F2C in another 10 years!
1 is the square root of all evil.
If you shut this guy down for talking outside his area of expertise using ideology to make his judgments, then you'd better get cracking on shutting Slashdot down.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.